It's impossible to move groups of small clips around when zoomed out on the playlist

Post your ideas and suggestions here

Return to “To Do”

[You can only see part of this thread as you are not logged in to the forums]
moighonfweeman
Wed Mar 29, 2023 7:10 pm

x

It's impossible to move groups of small clips around when zoomed out on the playlist

TLDR: Make it easier to use the mouse to move large selections/groups of multiple small playlist clips around when zoomed out.

Suppose you are trying to rearrange your song and need to move some playlist clips around.
The clips in question are one or two bars long, and are grouped into groups of size 16 bars.
If you are zoomed out such that you can see the entire track, it is nearly impossible to click-and-drag these chunks around, since it isn't enough to simply click the middle of the group, and instead you have to land your mouse on the center of one of the individual clips. If you don't land on the exact correct sub-pixel location, you instead end up resizing the clips.

I think that playlist behavior should be changed such that the user cannot resize clips when the clips are thinner (in terms of pixels onscreen) than a certain threshold.
The only exception should be when the user is at maximum playlist zoom.
Assuming the user isn't zoomed all the way in to work with really short clips, I can't really think of any situation where the user would want to be able to resize clips when they're visually so thin, as it wouldn't be possible to precisely control or see the results of the resizing anyways.

In order to give users the option to preserve the old behavior, this could be added as an option in the playlist Edit menu.
Alternatively, it could be toggled using a button on the top toolbar similar to the "enable groups" button.

As a final note, merging playlist clips isn't a perfect solution to this problem.
Using one big merged playlist clip causes the loss of many valuable workflow benefits of repeated small playlist clips; specifically, the ability for changes to one clip to be automatically applied to all other instances of the clip.

D3Mens
Thu Mar 30, 2023 10:31 am

x

Re: It's impossible to move groups of small clips around when zoomed out on the playlist

I'd love to see a solution for this problem too...
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.



Return to “To Do”